TARIN KOWT: As the six-vehicle police convoy climbs a riverbed, threading a rugged mountain pass that is the only route to Char China, our bulletproof Toyota 4WD reverberates with the hypnotic beat of Pashto music.

At the wheel is Mohammad Zia, the right-hand man to Matiullah Khan, the province's all-powerful police chief. But MK is back in Tarin Kowt, we're in staggeringly beautiful country and Mohammad smiles, as he indulges his fondness for the fabled Afghan crooner Ahmad Zahir – it's a lament on the danger that lurks in a woman's arched eyebrow.

It's appropriate enough. That evening we will be guests of Haji Qawee, the local police chief at Shahidi Hassas, the district centre of Char China in the far west of Oruzgan. To honour our presence he is throwing a bizarre Afghan version of the policeman's ball. Everyone is invited.

Bazi Dancing - Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan

URUZGAN-Bazi Dancing at a gathering of approximately 70 Uruzgan policemen in Charchino district, Afghan men perform the Bazi dance, based on the infamous Bacha Boy dances common during the Taliban reign. Bacha boys were commonly enslaved or prostituted to wealthy men, sexually abused and made to perform dances. Despite its history the dance is now considered a national dance. It performed by entertainers on this occasion. Charchino, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan. Taken by Sydney Morning Herald photographer Kate Geraghty. Selected images available from www.fairfaxsyndication.com. Follow us at http://twitter.com Photo: Kate Geraghty

The only arched eyebrows are those of the dancers – and they're all male.

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About 50 of Qawee's men squeeze into a small smoke-filled, mud-walled structure, watching wide-eyed as three kohl-eyed young men twirl like windmills in their sequins and robes. Swirling endlessly and effeminately to shrieking music from a band in the corner – a wild-eyed drummer and his mate, singing off-key as he rips at a homemade string instrument.

As the action starts, one of the dancers drops a long, lingering kiss on the back of the police chief's wrist and throughout the show the same performer plonks to his haunches with his rear-end just centimetres from the police chief's smiling face.

The dancing in the police compound is reminiscent of the bacha bazi or "boy-play" culture, in which boys become an owned-object for Afghan militia commanders and other prominent types, who make them dance at all-male parties and often abuse them sexually. They dress them in fine clothes and parade them, and get them to dance competitively to establish who has the "best boy".

Our university-educated translator explains that what we are watching is the dance form of the bacha bazi culture. But he insists that in this context it has been separated out as a "harmless entertainment" and is not necessarily suggestive of the coercive sexual abuse and denigration of bacha bazi – a custom far removed from the notion of sex between consenting adults.

Unlike the western appreciation of homosexuality as an issue of gender identity, same-gender sex among Pashtun males is more akin to sexual activity among prison inmates, according to Justin Richardson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. “They have sex with men primarily because . . . men are more available as sex partners than are women,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

But in Afghanistan harsher, more formative forces are at work than in most prison environments. Many boys and young men are denied the companionship of females and in the case of those who were dispatched to madrassas, a male often was substituted for the influence of motherhood.

Interestingly, and in the same way that a policewoman slapping the face of a young Tunisian market vendor was the spark that ignited the Arab Spring, various accounts of the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan say that its founder, Mullah Omar, first won public acclaim by intervening in a deadly shooting brawl between two commanders as they quarrelled over who "owned" a particular young bacha boy.

The Taliban made homosexuality an offence punishable by death – the preferred method being for the accused to be crushed under a toppling wall. But there are also accounts of the Taliban tolerating the sexual abuse of boys at madrassas or religious schools, and these days some militia commanders openly parade "their" boys.

Anna Marie Cardinalli of the US Human Terrain Teams, a controversial intelligence-anthropology hybrid agency that operated in Iraq and Afghanistan, attempted to look inside this world at the request of US and British forces stationed in Afghanistan's Helmand province.

In what has become a controversial paper, she wrote: “Women are foreign, and categorised by religious teachers as, at best, unclean or undesirable. It is then probable that the male companionship that a boy has known takes a sinister turn, in the form of the expression of pedophilia from the men that surround him.”

There is a strict prohibition on homosexuality in Islam, but its cultural acceptability or justification turns on acceptance of same-gender sexual gratification falling short of a man loving another male.

This throws up odd cases, such as that reported by Cardinalli of an outbreak of a sexually-transmitted disease among locally retained interpreters at an American base.

“They insisted they could not have caught the disease sexually because they were not homosexuals,” she writes. “Instead, they concluded that it was the result of mixing green and black tea, which became a running joke throughout the camp.”

Human Rights Watch last month highlighted a gap in Afghan law that left no legal impediment to the bacha bazi business – the absence of an age of consent for sex and a legal code that did not contain the term "rape" until 2009. Human Rights Watch acted after a 13-year-old boy victim of rape by two men was jailed for a year for "moral crimes".

In the space of just three weeks in Afghanistan, the issue of sex and sexuality emerged several times as a defining moment in local accounts of life and politics.

A horrific case, seemingly unreported save for a single local TV news item, came to light when an Afghan community health activist, Dr Basir, explained his decision to leave his family in Kabul and join the Save the Children [Australia] project in Oruzgan in 2010.

Considering his future, he was in Tarin Kowt when he saw the news bulletin – “in adjacent villages, there were two mullah-run madrassas for pre-teen boys. A boy fled from one of the madrassas to the other because the mullah was using him for sex.

“The aggrieved mullah demanded that the boy be returned to him, but the boy refused. So, with a gang of three or four others, he goes to the second madrassa in the middle of the night and they murder all of the boys – except one.

“They killed five boys, including the runaway.”

A shaken Dr Basir returned to Kabul, explaining to his wife that he needed to work in Tarin Kowt because he wanted the underprivileged children of Oruzgan to have some of the opportunities in life that their children enjoyed in Kabul. “She agreed – she's a good woman and I'm so proud of her,” he says.

Cardinalli writes of an American officer who had to fight his locally employed Afghan camp guards to rescue a 14-year-old boy who had been kidnapped from Kabul and taken to their base, hours away from the capital, for the sexual gratification of the guards. We heard another version of the story involving 22-year-old Ghulam Ali, at Sawar in Char China district.

The young man claims he was held hostage for more than a year, during which he was sexually abused by a group of "grey dogs", a shadowy Afghan force knows as the Afghan Security Guards, which was set up by the US to guard roads and bases.

Ghulam Ali is too ashamed to tell his own story. But he watches from under a verandah of wavy hair as Haji Abdul Raziq, police chief in the Saraw valley, explains how after being snatched from his family's fields at Yakh Dan, a nearby village, Ghulam Ali was hauled off in an American armoured vehicle and subjected to repeated sexual abuse at an ASG compound, within the perimeter of an American base at Sawar. ?

The young man escaped. When he refused to return, he and his family were accused of being with the Taliban. They say an American helicopter provided air cover while the ASG militia raided their home – detaining Ghulam Ali's father and brother to press him into returning to exploitative captivity.

Ultimately, all were released on the intervention of the provincial police chief Matiullah Khan.

The Oruzgan tribal elder Hajji Mohammad Qasim is ranting against the indulgence and corruption of members of the Kabul parliament, when he reveals bizarre complaints of sex abuse against his fellow Oruzgani and MP Hajji Obaidullah Barakzai.

Qasim said Obaidullah made regular visits to a Kabul dormitory for students from Oruzgan, hitting on the teenage son of a prominent public official in Tarin Kowt. He said Obaidullah would coerce the student to accompany him to all-male nights of dance and sex in the Panjshir Valley, north of Kabul – after which the student would be dumped back at the dormitory “with teeth marks on his neck and face”.

“The boys wanted to go to the media. Instead we did a deal to save Oruzgan from that shame – I told them that the next time an MP or senator went near the college, I'd strip him naked myself and deliver them to the media.

“The dispute was solved. Hajji Obaidullah gave the students 1000 Afghanis [$18] each – maybe they needed to buy socks. ”

Obaidullah is taken aback at inquires about the student's allegations. “I have worked for thousands of students to study in Kabul and abroad, but these complaints are news to me – the first I've heard of them.”